Analyze your Microsoft Dynamics AX data with Power BI

Microsoft Dynamics AX is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that helps you increase the speed of doing business. Our third Dynamics AX content pack for Power BI is for Cost Management, joining the Financial Performance and Retail Channel Performance packs that are already available. The Cost Management content pack, designed for COOs and CFOs, provides details on operation performance.

This post will explain how the Power BI content pack can help you analyze your Dynamics AX cost management data. For additional details on how to get started, please see the Dynamics AX content pack for Power BI help page.

To connect to the content pack, simply provide the URL to your AX instance and sign in. Note that only the latest version of Dynamics AX is supported. Once connected, Power BI will automatically create a dashboard, report, and dataset with data from your Dynamics AX account.

The out-of-the-box dashboard offers an overview of the cost management insights included in the content pack. Selecting any of the tiles brings you to a report page where you can browse further. For example, selecting the “Inventory ending balance” brings you to the Inventory Overall report page.

This report shows an overview of your inventory including accuracy, net change, and more. The report allows you to hover over the visualizations to see additional details and select a visual to cross filter the rest of the page to drill down further.

Select “edit report” to add or edit any of the pages or visuals in the reports. On the right-hand side of the screen, you’ll see a list of all the tables and fields you have access to in the content pack.

Hover over a visualization and select the pin icon to add it to your dashboard. Pinning will prompt you to select a destination dashboard, allowing you to customize and bring in data from multiple sources.

The Dynamics AX Cost Management content pack is based on a data entity that relies on a cached data set. After the initial import, the Power BI dashboard and reports will continue to update daily, showing the latest refresh of the Dynamics AX cache. With the Dynamics AX Cost Management content pack for Power BI, you have an initial set of insights that you can use to explore your data even further.

We’re always interested in hearing your feedback! Contact us at http://support.powerbi.com to let the team know how your experience was and if there’s anything we can do better.